Constance Emily Kent (1844–1944) was an English woman who confessed to the murder of her half-brother, Francis Saville Kent, in 1860, when she was aged 16 and he aged three. The case led to high-level pronouncements there was no longer any ancient priest-penitent privilege in England and Wales. In later life, Kent changed her name to Ruth Emilie Kaye and lived to age 100; she served a twenty-year prison term. Early life Constance Kent was born in Sidmouth, Devon, England, on 6 February 1844, the fifth daughter and ninth child of Samuel Saville (or Savill) Kent (1801–1872), an Inspector of Factories for the Home Office, and his first wife Mary Ann (1808–1852), daughter of prosperous coachmaker and expert on the Portland Vase, Thomas Windus of Stamford Hill, London. Crime Sometime during the night of 2930 June 1860, Francis Saville Kent, who was almost four years old, disappeared from his father's residence, Road Hill House, in the village of Rode (spelt "Road" at the time), then in Wiltshire. Francis' body was later found in the vault of a privy-house on the property. The child, still dressed in his nightshirt and wrapped in a blanket, had knife wounds on his chest and hands, and his throat was slashed so deeply that he was almost decapitated. Francis' nursemaid, Elizabeth Gough, was initially arrested. However, Elizabeth was released when the suspicions of Detective Inspector Jack Whicher of Scotland Yard moved to the boy's 16-year-old half-sister, Constance. She was arrested on 16 July but released without trial owing to public opinion against the accusations of a working-class detective against a young lady of breeding. This difference in class was used as a subplot by Wilkie Collins in his detective novel The Moonstone (1868). After the investigation collapsed, the Kent family moved to Wrexham and sent Constance to a finishing school in Dinan, France. Committal Constance was prosecuted for the murder five years later, in 1865. She made a statement confessing her guilt to an Anglo-Catholic clergyman, the Rev. Arthur Wagner, and expressed to him her resolution to give herself up to justice. Wagner assisted her in carrying out the resolution, and he gave evidence of this statement before the magistrates but prefaced his evidence by a declaration that he must withhold any further information on the ground that it had been received under the seal of "sacramental confession". He was but lightly pressed by the